| Please Don't Touch the Dinosaur | |
| Season 6, episode 18 | |
 | |
| Air date | February 23, 1993 |
| Writer(s) | Chuck Tatham & Jamie Tatham |
| Director | John Tracy |
| Previous | Silence is Not Golden |
| Next | Subterranean Graduation Blues |
Full House - Michelle Breaks the Dinosaur
Please Don't Touch the Dinosaur is episode eighteen of season six of Full House. It originally aired on February 23, 1993.
[]
In the living room, Joey and Jesse try their best to entertain Nicky, Alex, and Michelle with "This Old Man"; however, the twins end up falling asleep. When Michelle suggests playing a song that they can dance to, Joey suggests reggae to Jesse. So they try "This Old Man" again, this time, reggae style. This seems to get everyone in the mood to dance.
Synopsis[]
The episode starts with Danny reading a dinosaur bedtime story to Michelle, who's excited about tomorrow that she can't even sleep.
She and her class are going on a field trip to the local Museum of Natural History and Danny is one of the chaperones. When the other chaperone, Ms. Gwelch, cancels because of illness, Danny finds himself in over his head with being the only adult in charge of sixteen kids. Desperate to find a replacement before the trip, he persuades Jesse to come along. Danny feels hurt when Michelle chooses to be with Jesse's group instead of his because she thinks that Jesse would let the kids have some fun, while Danny would act like a sergeant who makes too many rules.
At the museum, Danny keeps his group on a tight leash. Jesse, on the other hand, lets his kids run wild throughout the exhibits. Danny also treats Jesse coldly, lecturing him on how to handle things, creating tension between the two. While in the dinosaur exhibit, Michelle and Denise Frazer start playing a game of tag and accidentally dislodge the left fibula of a $4M dinosaur skeleton (of a 27-foot-long, 13½-foot-tall [8 feet at the hips], 2½-ton late Cretaceous hadrosaur, or "duck-billed" dinosaur, known as Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus, discovered in China and identifiable by the 16-inch spiky crest on its forehead). This results in most of the skeleton collapsing, and effectively ends the field trip.
Meanwhile, back at the house, Stephanie accidentally gives Joey's Nolan Ryan baseball card, worth $2K, to Steve Hale.
Jesse is required to volunteer at the museum on weekends, in lieu of them pressing charges for the damaged structure. When Danny, Jesse, and Michelle return home, Danny explodes at Jesse, berating him for letting his group get so out of control. Jesse explains he was just letting the kids cut loose. Danny snaps at Jesse asking when he will stop being “Mr. Cool” and starts taking his responsibilities more seriously?" Jesse finally fed up asks "When will you get off my back?" while Danny continues to berate him. As the fight escalates, Michelle becomes more and more upset until she finally yells at them to stop fighting. She tells them that she knocked over the dinosaur and that it was her fault before running upstairs (to which the studio audience goes "Ohh" with sympathy).
Realizing that their arguing did no good except hurt Michelle, Danny and Jesse follow her up to her room. There, they apologize for their behavior. They explain that while she did knock over the skeleton, the real reason the field trip was a disaster was that neither one of them did a good job at being in charge (with Jesse with being too flexible and soft, and Danny being too strict and hard). Danny admits (as the inspirational music plays) that the real reason why he was so hard on Jesse was that he felt hurt that Michelle wanted to be in Jesse's group instead of being with his, and he apologizes to Jesse. Jesse promises to be more responsible when it comes to being in charge but still hang a little loose, while Danny admits that he does have a tendency to make too many rules sometimes, and he promises to tone it down and be more reasonable when it comes to making rules. They then tickle Michelle (as the audience applauds and the EP credits appear).
Quotes[]
- Danny: [to Jesse] I don't need advice from a guy who spent half his school years in the principal's office.
- Jesse: Oh, look who's talking. You wanted to be hall-monitor just so you could bust people for putting their lips on the drinking fountain.
- Danny: If it weren't for people like you, we wouldn't have needed hall-monitors.
- Jesse: Rules were meant to be broken.
- Danny: Piñatas were meant to be broken.
- Michelle: I broke the dinosaur!
- Denise (observing the wreckage, and noticing that only the dinosaur skeleton's tail is still intact): Man! There's nothin' left but his butt!
After the dinosaur in the museum is destroyed...
- Danny: Jesse... what did you do?!
- Jesse: You have any glue?
After Michelle, Jesse and Danny come home from the museum.
- Danny: Hey, Jess... tell me again. The foot bone's connected to what?
- Jesse: C'mon, give it a rest, okay? They said they could fix the dinosaur, and I promised to do volunteer work at the museum. For the next 10 weekends in a row, I'm gonna be combing out the woolly mammoth.
- Danny: You're lucky they didn't press charges. You know, I asked you to make sure that the kids follow the rules, but did you listen to me?! No, not you! Not "Mr. Fun Boy"!
- Jesse: C'mon, Mr. Law and Order, I was just tryin' to let the kids have some fun, and so it got a little outta hand.
- Danny: A little outta hand?! Jess, a little out of hand is cutting in line at the algae exhibit. You let the kids run totally wild! They knocked over a priceless dinosaur!
- Jesse: Oh come on, it's not priceless, they said it was only worth about like, 4,000,000 bucks.
- Danny: When are you gonna stop tryin' to be Mr. Cool, and start taking your responsibilities more seriously?
- Jesse: When are you gonna get off my back?
- Danny: I'll get off your back when you start acting like a grown man!
- Michelle: Stop it! Stop fighting! I'm the one who knocked it over, you remember? It's my fault! [She runs upstairs, very upset and in tears.]
- Danny: Let's go. [Both he and Jesse head upstairs.]
Trivia[]
•This is the first time that Michelle tells two members of her family to stop arguing. (It happens again in the season seven premiere when D.J. and Stephanie are arguing while they are in her and Stephanie's room.)
•When Jesse says, "How does that song go? – "The foot bone is connected to the...", it is a reference to the first line of "Dem Bones", an old spiritual song which talks about the bones in the body and how they are connected.
•Danny tells Michelle that dinosaurs lived long before people, which most of them did, but evidence indicates that birds are tetanuran theropods.** Therefore, when birds are taken into consideration, dinosaurs are still very much alive today. Tsintaosaurus's crest has recently been found to have been fan-shaped rather than spike-shaped.* Also, Tsintaosaurus has been found to have been much larger even than the skeleton in this episode indicates; this dinosaur could have grown to be 40 feet long, 10½ feet high at the hips as it walked on all fours, and about 7½ tons in mass, making it the largest of the crested hadrosaurs.**
SOURCE(S):
*•Prieto-Márquez, Albert, and Jonathan R. Wagner. "The 'Unicorn' Dinosaur That Wasn't: A New Reconstruction of the Crest of Tsintaosaurus and the Early Evolution of the Lambeosaurine Crest and Rostrum". PLOS One. Nov. 22, 2013. https://journals.plos.org.
**•Paul, Gregory S. "The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, 2nd ed. by Gregory S. Paul, published by Indiana University Press, 2016, pp. 89 and 342-343.
•Hadrosaurs such as Tsintaosaurus belonged to the order Ornithischia, suborder Ornithopoda, family Hadrosauridae. Like other ornithischian dinosaurs, hadrosaurs were herbivores. They were once thought to have been semiaquatic, but they are now known to have been mainly terrestrial, since their hands were padded rather than webbed, and their tails were too stiffened by bony tendons to have been of much use in side-to-side propulsion for swimming. Also, their multiple rows of back teeth for chewing meant that they were adapted to feed on tough terrestrial vegetation, rather than on soft aquatic vegetation.
SOURCE(S):
•Brett-Surman, M. K.. "Ornithopods". The Complete Dinosaur, edited by James O. Farlow and M. K. Brett-Surman, published by Indiana University Press, 1997, pp. 339-343.
•It's strange that this episode doesn't feature the skeleton of a more recently-discovered dinosaur, such as the mid-Jurassic sauropod Shunosaurus, whose fossils were also found in China. Even though Shunosaurus was smallish for a sauropod--it was only about 30 feet long (its head was 1 foot long; its neck, 6 feet; its torso, 8 feet; its tail, 15 feet), 7½ feet high at the hips, and 4½ tons in mass--it was remarkable nevertheless, for it's one of the few known sauropod dinosaurs with a tail club. This alone measured a foot and a half long, and was adorned with a pair of spikes that were about 6 inches long in life.* Shunosaurus was named in 1983, 25 years after Tsintaosaurus.*** Another good choice would have been the predatory non-tetanuran theropod Carnotaurus, of late Cretaceous Argentina. Carnotaurus was named in 1985****, and it was unusual in having a pair of horns above its eyes. The horns had a span of about 7 inches. Based on its 8-inch-high cervical vertebrae, or neck bones**, Carnotaurus was 19 feet long and 6 feet high at the hips, and its mass was probably about a ton. Its 4-fingered arms were only 14 inches long; its mouth, 10 inches long by 6 inches wide.*****
SOURCE(S):
*•Benton, Michael. "THE A-Z GUIDE TO PREHISTORIC ANIMALS". Dinosaur and Other Prehistoric Animal Fact Finder. 3rd edition. Edited by John Grisewood and Nicola Barber. 1992, Grisewood & Dempsey, Inc., pp. 214 and 238.
**•Currie, Philip J.. "Theropods". The Complete Dinosaur, illustration redrawn from José F. Bonaparte (1990), Indiana University Press, 1997, page 219.
***•McIntosh, John S. et al. "Sauropods". The Complete Dinosaur, illustration by Gregory S. Paul, edited by James O. Farlow and M. K. Brett-Surman, published by Indiana University Press, 1997, page 273.
****•Parker, Steve. "The Great Predators". Dinosaurus: The Complete Guide to Dinosaurs. 2nd edition. Edited by Emma Bastow (editorial director), 2016, Firefly Books Ltd., page 113.
*****•Paul, Gregory S.. "Group and Species Accounts: Theropods". The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs. 2nd edition. Princeton University Press, 2016, page 88.